France Makes Its Bid to be Recognized as Global AI Hub

VentureBeat – France wants to become Europe’s biggest hub for machine learning and artificial intelligence startups. According to Paris-based venture capital firm ISAI, there are now at least 180 AI startups in France. The country is hoping that more than a few of these can become breakout stars to cement France’s global reputation as an AI hub. One of these hopefuls is Snips. Snips is an app that collects all the data across your smartphone apps. The app will then use these insights to become your incredibly smart personal assistant. The startup raised $6.5 million in venture capital last year, taking a small chunk of the $108 million in total raised by French AI startups between January 2014 and mid-October 2016.

Another French startup, Smartly.ai, was interviewed by Voicebot recently. Crunchbase shows that Smartly.ai rasised a 400k Euro seed round in July 2016 led by BNP Paribas.

There are signs that the global artificial intelligence community is starting to take note, particularly the U.S. Last year Facebook announced it was opening its global AI Research Center in Paris and Paris-based Moodstocks was acquired by Google earlier this year. But France still lags behind its European competitor, the U.K., in the artificial intelligence startup race. During the same time period, AI startups in the U.K. raised $342 million in venture capital. The included Deepmind which was acquired by Google partent Alphabet. LINK